An agricultural vehicle, such as an agricultural harvester, for example a combine or combine harvester, is used to harvest crop on a field. In most cases, the agricultural vehicle is equipped with a grain tank to temporarily store the harvested crop on board of the harvester. This grain tank can be unloaded into a separate container, which can be part of a vehicle container combination maneuvering next to the agricultural vehicle in the field. The operator of the agricultural vehicle is expected to continuously monitor and control multiple functionalities during harvesting, including the relative position of the container to the agricultural vehicle and the unloading into the container. To aid the operator in this task, several systems are known, such as a system comprising a 3D camera to monitor the filling degree of harvested crop in the container and the position of the container relative to the agricultural vehicle. However, this system has proven to be unreliable in dusty environments, since the crop pixels and wall pixels obtained by the 3D-camera are distorted dramatically even when only limited amount of dust was generated.
WO2007/122394, for example, proposes a locating system designed to locate one or more tags, and comprising two or more, preferably four, tag locating sensors which receive UWB (ultra wideband) radio pulses transmitted by the tags and, based on the angle and the time difference of arrival of the UWB pulses, locate the tags fairly accurately, with the accuracy being approximately 15 cm or 6 inch.
The object of the current invention is to provide an improved unloading automation system for unloading crop from an agricultural vehicle into a container.